Lev Manovich Quotes

• As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

  Lev Manovich

  Order, Enemy, Events

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• Any unique image that you desire probably already exists on the internet or in some database... the problem today is no longer how to create the right image, but how to find an already existing one.

  Lev Manovich

  Unique, Desire, Today

  Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.401, MIT Press

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• ... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Technology, Reality

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• ... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Loss, Technology

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• We turn our own lives into an information archive by storing all our emails, SMS, digital photos, and other digital traces of our existence.

  Lev Manovich

  Email, Sms, Archives

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• It has become a cliché to announce that 'we live in a remix culture'... What was referred to in post-modern times as quoting, appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs any special name. Now this is simlpy the basic logic of cultural production.

  Lev Manovich

  Names, Design, Special

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• ... what is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism - the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.

  Lev Manovich

  Reality, Fake, Cameras

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• Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open.

  Lev Manovich

  Reality, Way, Accepting

  Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.288, MIT Press

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• The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Digital

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• During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Reality, Drawing

  Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.168, MIT Press

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